As is well known, organizations such as corporations employ many internal processes and procedures for carrying out their business. For example, companies may set procedures for far ranging functions such as purchasing supplies, providing training, as well as the management of their business programs. In the situation where an organization is small and has a small number of employees, the use of processes and procedures may be less important. This is because parties involved are usually aware of what others are doing in the organization and the focus of the particular organization is quite narrow.
As an organization grows, and more and more people are employed and performing different tasks, it becomes more important that common processes and procedures be implemented. The reason for having common processes and procedures are many, but they mostly revolve around ensuring efficiency of the business and the avoidance of duplication of effort.
As such, it is commonplace for an organization to generate sets of policies and procedures which are to be used by most or all of the employees within a particular organization. Depending on the size of the organization, the institution of processes and procedures may be performed in a manner such that a set of governing procedures may be created for the entire organization while individual groups may generate their own processes which are more applicable to tasks and other functions which are unique to them.
One difficulty which may be encountered in establishing a governing set of policies and procedures is providing organization wide access to this information. Also, even if access is provided to these items it may still be difficult to assure that all members in the organization have access to deletions, additions, and updates of the processes and procedures.
One manner in which some organizations have provided organization wide access to their processes and procedures is to distribute these items in paper form to all employees which would be using said processes and procedures in their work. Periodically, additions, deletions, or updates may be issued in paper form which the employee would then use to manually update their copy. One drawback of this system is that the use of the most updated procedures by the employees is dependent on the individual employees updating their processes and procedures manuals in a timely fashion.